HEART of palm salad

Last week we spent a week on the beach at a cottage on Lake Michigan, the "BIG" lake, "THE lake". If you are a Michigander from the West side, and someone says they are going to "the lake", you know they mean Lake Michigan. There are a bAzillion lakes in this state....well maybe a half a bazillion...anyway...

We stayed on the mother of lakes. Have you ever been somewhere and it reminds you of someplace else you've been. The smell.....or just something about it. A couple years back we took our kiddos and traveled to Costa Rica for two weeks on the beach. It was magnifee-cO!

Paradise! Hanging on the beach last week reminded me of the fresh produce and simple fresh food we had in Costa Rica. It was the first place I ever partook of hearts of palm. How do I describe hearts of palm.....hmmm...pickley...kinda, fresh...yummy....definetly. I had to google hearts of palm to figure out exactly what they are....it really is the heart of palm trees...the middle of the new palm tree shoots, baby palm hearts... I am just glad that it had nothing to do with this guy....

YIKers, he scared the bajeebers out of my littlest son....scared the hearts of palm right out of him. These dudes are everywhere down there...they won't hurt you...but they sure is OOOgly.

So last week I whipped us up a salad, that included palm hearts.

SIMPLE, easy, you can do it in 2 minutes flat. The hardest thing might just be finding the palm hearts. I found them in my grocery store next to the canned artichoke hearts....in the heart section of your local grocery store. Or Costco has these nice big jars enough to make a salad or two and have some left for snacking.

Here is what you will need:

limes

tomatoes

avocados

hearts of palm

fresh ground pepper

course salt or kosher salt

There it is THE jar of palm hearts the star of todays show!

There is no real recipe....just cut up your tomatoes, avocados, and hearts up in to nice sized chunks. I do equal amounts...nice proportions....just like to be fair. Wouldn't want the maters getting there feelings hurt or anything. By the way I prefer roma tomatoes. Just in case you were wondering... Then juice your lime or limes (or really any citrus is fabulous...I really prefer orange, but I didn't have one handy) over the motley crew and then give it a good crack of pepper and a generous shake of salt and there you have it!!!

Here is how we had it last week. All fancy...it was part of our appetizer course, before the shrimp boil, thus the newspaper table cloth..

You can pretend that you are in paradise while you nibble on you salad.

Enjoy!